How MOY candidate Hinch got Tigers to buy in

This story was excerpted from Jason Beck's Tigers Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

The Tigers were struggling to get over .500 in mid-August, having shipped out many of their veterans at the July 30 Trade Deadline and brought up a slew of prospects to take their place, when manager A.J. Hinch challenged his team with a simple question: What kind of team do you want to be?

“It wasn’t us getting blasted,” Beau Brieske explained last month. “It wasn’t anything bad. It was more so just asking us and having everyone look in the mirror and ask themselves: What am I doing to be part of a winning team? …

“What I remember is just to try to put everything else to the side and realize that the goal as a group is to try to win. And all of the numbers and all of the contract stuff, he said, all of that stuff will take care of itself if you go out there and you play for one another and win. … It was impactful for sure.”

From there, the Tigers’ pitching strategy rose, with a frenetic mix of openers, bulk relievers, bullpen games and pitching changes. So did Detroit’s youth movement, with the arrivals of rookies Trey Sweeney, Jace Jung, Brant Hurter and Ty Madden.

It wasn’t glamorous, but if the Tigers were serious about trying to salvage the season, it was necessary. But the players had to be all-in.

“Buy-in's not for free,” Hinch said. “You've got to get players to understand the bigger goal. You've got to get players to understand how we're going to maximize their strengths. You've got to have players that will give up something in order for another person to have an opportunity.”

The Tigers’ buy-in is part of how Detroit earned its first winning season since 2016, first postseason berth since 2014, and first playoff series win since Jim Leyland’s final season in 2013. It’s also how Hinch ended up becoming one of three finalists for the American League Manager of the Year Award.

All three Manager of the Year finalists come from playoff teams in the AL Central, a reflection of just how much the division surpassed expectations. But Hinch’s situation is unique, because much of that success came in the final two months of the season, turning around a campaign that even the Tigers had seemingly turned towards the future with their Deadline moves.

To be fair, the Tigers had plenty of full-season numbers to admire, from 31 one-run victories to 36 comeback wins to identical 43-38 records at home and on the road. Their longest losing streak of the season was just five games. But that home stretch is why we’re talking about Hinch having a chance to win an award that has eluded him in his career.

The Tigers weren’t the first to utilize openers and bulk pitchers for an extended stretch, but arguably no team was as successful with it for as prolonged of a stretch as Detroit. While AL Cy Young Award favorite Tarik Skubal provided innings and wins down the stretch, Hinch mixed and matched pitchers on other days to help squeak out wins while allowing some youngsters to get acclimated to the big leagues and others to realize the potential they’d been struggling to meet.

“With this team, it comes down to two things: Trust and belief,” Sean Guenther said during the postseason run. “If you can trust you're being put in the right spots and you believe, like the staff does, that you're the guy for that job, then it just becomes pretty black and white. It becomes: Can I just do my job and help us win this ballgame? You have to trust you're there for the right reasons, and you have to believe you're good enough to get the job done. Those are things we reiterate every day. Lots of affirmation, lots of support.”

That was the first part of the challenge. The second part was keeping the Tigers on task once they worked their way into the playoff chase. The Tigers played like a team with nothing to lose, in large part because they stayed focused on the game in front of them. That, too, is a credit to Hinch.

“We’ve been playing playoff baseball since mid-August,” Hinch said the night the Tigers clinched a playoff berth, “the way we’ve been using our roster, the way we’ve been asking guys to do things a little differently, the pressure that [we’ve] been under with a small margin for error. Maybe they didn’t know quite as much because we were just trying to focus on the day, which is what I do, but I had to continue to remind them: This is exactly what it’s like.”